Collins Lake

There’s nothing like watching your three-year-old baby girl catch her first fish!  Never mind that she was top line trolling a pink Neddlefish for trout and pulled up a bass.  And that wasn’t the only one, we caught three juvenile bass on our trout rigs yesterday afternoon, one at the inlet, one by the mouth of the east bay and a third near eastern shoreline.  We also caught a limit of trout but that’s to be expected– lots of folks have been hitting limits in the last few days.

Steve, Dillon, Mitch & Steve Sr limited, mostly on Gold Rapalas down around 20′ here’s some of the keepers

We had a busy weekend with both California Inland Fisheries Foundation Inc “CIFFI” & KAST events producing a good showing of fish.  Among them, twins Lee & Maci Haskins with a pair of trout each and “Grandpa” Haskins with a 6 pound beauty:

The Haskins’ insisted that they caught these trout on “fishing poles in the water… the wet part” so all I can say is that among the many fish at the CIFFI scales the lures I heard the most about were orange Rapalas down about 20ft.  Yesterday I did drop a line down to those 40-60ft pings on the fish finder but all the action was on the top line and a downrigger set at 22. 

Missed the CIFFI Derby?  Join us for the Collins Lake Family Trout Derby on May 4th

Madison Felter and family landed fish all week long, among them this 6lb rainbow caught on a Rapala, Kyle brought his in on a Blue Rapala, Ellie on a Red Rooster Tail and Ron with a 5 pound fish caught bankfishing with green PowerBait:

Congratulations to Ryan Barella who took home the CIFFI trophy with an 8.3 pound behemoth:

Ryan doesn’t like me to give away his secrets but he’s got enough custom lures that honestly even if you knew what it was it might not be something you could buy.  My advise, troll@20ft with a bright Rapala or Needlefish.  If you can avoid the weekends you won’t have to look for boat trailer parking.  Monday was just about perfect.  If you’re fishing from shore you might try hiking Hidden Spruce Trail or walking around the south east side since the lake is still completely full so the flooded spillway flats limit available shoreline.

Jimmie Wynne & Jimm Trejo show off a coupla limits

  You could always rent a boat! (Aren’t I such a salesman)

Elaine seems to be able to catch bass year round!

This last week felt like an early summer and we’ve got the surface temperatures to prove it.  Conventional wisdom is to look for bass spawning at 55F to 65F.  Today’s morning reading at 3ft was 68.2F and on a hot afternoon your depth finder read the surface up to 73F but ignoring the depth vs temperature calculations I think I can say empirically that bass are still in pre-spawn.  With the skunk from three weeks ago thoroughly evacuated, I am itching for the wind to die down to try my luck in a quiet cove for a trophy bass.  I have seen a few catfish & crappie but I think for the moment it’s more novelty than news, but it won’t be long before I’ll be publishing panfish. 

Until then Happy Catching!